Guidelines for buying alpines regarding looking good all the year:

In your small space you need to buy alpines that together have interest the whole year round.

The first challenge is getting a few plants that look great through the winter time.
A good place to start is by looking at our evergreen plants – which means they won’t look totally dead in the winter!
So the first tip is to buy alpine plants that look good in the winter.

The second most difficult season is the autumn, so buy some alpines that look good then – our list of autumn flowering plants has a surprising number of alpines.

As far as alpines are concerned it is easy to find many that will flower in the spring, so buy the alpines that are on our spring flowering list.

That now only leaves the summer time, and again there are many alpines, so choose from our summer flowering list.

Guidelines for what alpines to buy regarding sizes:

If your planting space is really small, then consider buying alpines from our really compact 5cm wide to 20cm wide range.
It gets frustrating when you’ve planted your compact alpines and then you buy one that turns out to be a real thug and completely smothers the other alpines!

Guidelines for buying alpines regarding soil:

If you are planting alpines in a container, then you will need to buy a compost to fill it.
Avoid the compost that is full of very fine particles, or that is based on sedge peat, because the drainage will not be good and it can cause the roots to rot.
If you go for a peat based or other non-soil based compost it will dry out quickly, so buy some soil based compost to mix in with it.

If you are planting alpines in your garden, it is always good to incorporate some soil improver so that it improves the drainage and gives the soil some more organic matter.
If you have a clay soil then you will need to buy alpines from our plants for clay soils list.

So if you haven’t got massive plans for your entire garden, then you could concentrate on the little spaces nearest to your doorways, or pathways, or patio.
It’s amazing how much pleasure a few plants can bring to your life!

Here’s a colourful border in early summer with a small wildlife pond (in the centre of the photo).

The soil had a fair amount of clay in it and things like Thymes would not survive over winter, but as you can see from the list below, there are quite a number of alpines that cope with these conditions.

This 2 minute video at the bottom of this page, shows you some tips to planting up a flower bed.

If the area has perennial weeds in it, like couch grass, nettles, thistles, docks. creeping buttercup, etc then the easiest and most effective way is to spray it with a weedkiller like Roundup which is not a really nasty chemical.
If you don’t want to use any chemicals, then every bit of root will have to be picked out while you are digging.

How to plant a border

The video covers:

Using soil improver (our local Council tip sells it – made from the green waste we throw away) which is much more environment friendly than using peat based ones.

Digging the bed.

Marking out the area with canes into one metre squares and following a plan.

Planting – remembering to separate the roots to enable them to quickly grow into the new soil.

Have you got any small plants that fall to pieces at ground level?Whole stems get detached from the ground.
This is typically on soft stemmed plants.

This plant problem could be due to:

An attack by a fungal pathogen, such as Rhizoctonia, Pythium, Phytophthora, etc. Most, or all, of the roots will be brown or black, and dead – not white or fresh looking. [1]

An attack by one or more pests eating the roots away, such as Leatherjackets, Cutworms [2] or Vine Weevil.

When I saw the damage done to the Sedum in the picture above, I immediately thought it was Vine Weevil damage.
But after careful inspection of carefully pulling the compost to pieces I couldn’t find an offending Vine Weevil larvae anywhere.
It being winter time, the almost dormant Vine Weevil larvae would have been just lying, buried in the compost, but my conclusion is that the Vine Weevil biological predator (see at the bottom of the page for purchasing this) had found it before I did!
I did want to include a picture of one of the Vine Weevil larvae, but I can’t find any!

You can see on the picture that a couple of the stems have begun to root again into the compost.

The problem with Vine Weevil is that you can have a plant in your garden, or a neighbours, that is a host plant and from there the weevils wander off to lays eggs on your choice, smaller, softer plants.

The least obvious host plants for the adult weevils can be:

Rhododendron

evergreen Euonymus

Hydrangea

Epimedium

Strawberry

Primula

Bergenia

They chew out notches in the leaf margins.
I have heard that some people go out when it is dark with a torch and some pliers to crush the offending adult weevils!

The larvae stage is the most destructive, and they look like little white bananas about 5mm long.

The most tempting plants for the Vine Weevil grubs are:

Cyclamen

Begonia

Cacti and succulents

other house plants

Strawberries

Primulas

Polyanthus

Sedum

Saxifraga (mossy types)

Heuchera

young Yew (Taxus)

If you are interested in the Vine Weevil predator (which I highly recommend) it can be purchased from Amazon – the link* below will take you to the correct page:

Nemasys vine weevil killer standard pack
This is not a chemical but a live product that needs to be used right away.
It is mixed with water and then sprinkled on the ground around your plants with a watering can.
It is not a chemical and is harmless to children, pets and adults!

Buy alpines, rockery plants and other plants from our mail order nursery.

Written by Peter Reason who is the founder and owner of Boundary Nursery which has been serving local Garden Centres and plant nurseries with alpines and herbs since 1993.
That business is now dedicated to mail order plants through the post.

Peter began his horticultural training in 1974.

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